Reduction of Aversive Learning Rates in Pavlovian Conditioning by Angiotensin II Antagonist Losartan: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Angiotensin receptor blockade has been linked to aspects of aversive learning and memory formation and to the prevention of posttraumatic stress disorder symptom development.

Methods: We investigated the influence of the angiotensin receptor blocker losartan on aversive Pavlovian conditioning using a probabilistic learning paradigm. In a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled design, we tested 45 (18 female) healthy volunteers during a baseline session, after application of losartan or placebo (drug session), and during a follow-up session.

A single administration of the antibiotic, minocycline, reduces fear processing and improves implicit learning in healthy volunteers: analysis of the serum metabolome.

Minocycline has shown therapeutic promise in pre-clinical animal models and early phase clinical trials for a variety of psychiatric disorders. Previous studies on minocycline have shown its ability to suppress microglia activity and reduce inflammatory cytokine levels, and its amelioration of depressive-like behaviour in animals and humans. However, the underlying mechanisms that lead to minocycline's psychotropic effects are not clear.

Methylphenidate enhances implicit learning in healthy adults.

Background And Purpose: One limiting factor in the development of pharmacological interventions to enhance cognition is the absence of biomarkers that can be used in healthy volunteers to screen novel compounds. Drug discovery has tended to rely heavily on explicit measures of cognition, but these are typically insensitive to cognition-enhancing effects in healthy volunteers. This study investigated whether a novel battery of implicit cognition measures is sensitive to the effects of methylphenidate (Ritalin) in healthy volunteers.

A specific role for serotonin in overcoming effort cost.

Unlabelled: Serotonin is implicated in many aspects of behavioral regulation. Theoretical attempts to unify the multiple roles assigned to serotonin proposed that it regulates the impact of costs, such as delay or punishment, on action selection. Here, we show that serotonin also regulates other types of action costs such as effort.

Better sexual acceptability of agomelatine (25 and 50 mg) compared to escitalopram (20 mg) in healthy volunteers. A 9-week, placebo-controlled study using the PRSexDQ scale.

Unlabelled: The present double-blind, placebo-controlled study evaluates the effects of agomelatine and the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor escitalopram on sexual dysfunction in healthy men and women.

Methods: A total of 133 healthy volunteers (67 men, 66 women) were randomly assigned to agomelatine (25 or 50 mg) or escitalopram (20 mg) or placebo for nine weeks. Sexual acceptability was evaluated by using the psychotropic-related sexual dysfunction questionnaire 5-items total score and sexual dysfunction relative to each sub-score (in 110 volunteers with sexual activity).

Short-term plasticity of visuo-haptic object recognition.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have provided ample evidence for the involvement of the lateral occipital cortex (LO), fusiform gyrus (FG), and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) in visuo-haptic object integration. Here we applied 30 min of sham (non-effective) or real offline 1 Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to perturb neural processing in left LO immediately before subjects performed a visuo-haptic delayed-match-to-sample task during fMRI. In this task, subjects had to match sample (S1) and target (S2) objects presented sequentially within or across vision and/or haptics in both directions (visual-haptic or haptic-visual) and decide whether or not S1 and S2 were the same objects.

Vision holds a greater share in visuo-haptic object recognition than touch.

The integration of visual and haptic input can facilitate object recognition. Yet, vision might dominate visuo-haptic interactions as it is more effective than haptics in processing several object features in parallel and recognizing objects outside of reaching space. The maximum likelihood approach of multisensory integration would predict that haptics as the less efficient sense for object recognition gains more from integrating additional visual information than vice versa.

Does training or deprivation modulate amygdala activation?

Amygdala involvement in visual emotional processing has been unequivocally established, but the amygdala's participation in auditory emotional processing is less clear. In a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging study (Klinge et al., 2010) we investigated the amygdala's role in auditory emotional processing in blind and sighted humans.

The left fusiform gyrus hosts trisensory representations of manipulable objects.

During object manipulation the brain integrates the visual, auditory, and haptic experience of an object into a unified percept. Previous brain imaging studies have implicated for instance the dorsal part of the lateral occipital complex in visuo-tactile and the posterior superior temporal sulcus in audio-visual integration of object-related inputs (Amedi et al., 2005).

Corticocortical connections mediate primary visual cortex responses to auditory stimulation in the blind.

Blind individuals have to rely on nonvisual information to a greater extent than sighted to efficiently interact with the environment, and consequently exhibit superior skills in their spared modalities. These performance advantages are often paralleled by responses in the occipital cortex, which have been suggested to be essential for nonvisual processing in the blind. However, it is currently unclear through which pathways (i.

Increased amygdala activation to emotional auditory stimuli in the blind.

Emotional signals are of pivotal relevance in social interactions. Neuroimaging and lesion studies have established an important role of the amygdala for the processing of these signals. While the human amygdala receives input from all sensory modalities, it is the visual modality that is most important for emotional aspects in social interactions.